As he approached the cottage where Annie Lipsett was staying he felt less interested in the state of her mind and more concerned to see herself and discover how she was keeping in health. Health, he thought, was most important, perhaps more important than anything else. “Grant us in health and wealth long to live.” He recited the words aloud, and his mind commented that wealth meant well-being, not a fine house and raiment and a substantial account at the bankers. That struck him with all the force of an original discovery, and he began to think that his life was not perhaps such a complete failure as he had grown used to thinking it. His arrival at the gate of the cottage cut short his speculations, and he wrenched himself back to the problem immediately before him, the bringing of this sinful soul to repentance. Yes; he must make her see that her sins would only be forgiven her on condition of full repentance. He felt fully convinced of [Pg 220]it in that moment, and did his best to make himself feel miserable in spite of the invitation to happiness extended to him by the little grass path leading up to the door of the white cottage, and the Michaelmas daisies and autumn lilies and purple asters growing in the borders and the heavily laden fruit trees in the tiny orchard DR REBORN .

He walked up the grass path and knocked at the low oaken door. In the house he heard a bustling and a rustling, and presently the door was opened to him by the woman of the house. She was enormously fat, red-faced and comely DR REBORN . She said:

“Tha can coom in. Annie be oot in’t fields gatherin’ noots. Tha’ll be Mr. Folyat. Tha’s a gradely mon. Coom in.”

Francis followed her into the little low oak-beamed room, spick and span and clean as a new pin. There was a picture of Queen Victoria on the walls, five texts, and a grocer’s almanac, horribly reproducing in oleographic colour a pre-Raphaelite picture of Christ knocking at a door. The woman, Mrs. Entwistle, brewed a pot of tea and chattered:

“She be that well, tha’d think she were going to make no more fuss than a beast. Eeh! The way t’ bloom ’ave coom to her cheeks and ’t light to ’er eyes ye’d say a woman was all t’ better for carryin’ DR REBORN . . . .”

Francis began to take the same delight in the enormous woman that had come to him from the sights of his walk. She was so sane and comfortable.

“Eeh,” she said, “It was a good thing to get ’er away from ’er mother. I never could do wi’ them stringy little women. A ’ard time? ’Course she’s ’ad a ’ard time. So’s everybody, but you don’t want the world to go grizzlin about it.”

Annie came in. She was very pretty, with a new soft pride in her eyes. She was very big. She took Francis’s hand and clung to it, and with eyes and voice together she said: